We do not know who is currently in control of Venezuela. Because only President Maduro has been captured, it is presumably Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who is next in line under the Venezuelan constitution. This would be an unusual arrangement if it lasts, as there are only limited benefits to the US for deposing Maduro while leaving his loyalists in charge.
The Venezuelan opposition, despite its many promises of being ready to step in and set up an alternative government should Maduro fall, has always been deeply divided. The nation's opposition movement contains many groups who disagree about basically everything except opposition to the current government. Unsurprisingly, the US government has cultivated close ties with the most internationally-connected parts of the movement's neoliberal right-wing.
The most prominent opposition member at the moment is a member of this neoliberal right wing: María Corina Machado, the recent winner of a Nobel Peace Prize despite her advocacy for violent military action against her home country. Machado fled Venezuela in December and is now believed to be somewhere in Europe, and she has celebrated Maduro's ouster this morning.
Unless they have someone else up their sleeve, Machado is most likely the US government's preferred replacement for Maduro. She has spent months promising that she would "privatize all our industry" and that US businesses would "make a lot of money." In November, she released a "Freedom Manifesto" promising "a free marketplace of ideas and enterprise," a government that does not "[exert] a heavy hand on the marketplace," and to "reeestablish alliances" in the western hemisphere.
One line in particular jumps out at me: "It is time to return power to the people, to the citizens, to the private sector." What an incredible sleight-of-hand, to promise the surrender of your nation's resources to foreign capitalists in the name of empowering "the people." It seems to me that Machado is offering to swap Venezuela's political dictatorship with an economic dictatorship.
amandla
2087
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dailybridgerton
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